Hey, Wrong Category!
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Why place Sandra Bernhard’s review (“An I-Full of Bernhard at Coach House,” Aug. 19) under the rubric of “performance art”?
Sandra is an excellent stand-up comedian and does skits and musical numbers. This does not make her a performance artist.
As my friend writer Jacki Apple, says, Bernhard is an entertainer who deals in a form of satire that could be dubbed experimental or radical entertainment. Lenny Bruce and Lily Tomlin come to mind in this category.
Performance art has a tradition of visual or sound-oriented conceptual content that is usually cross-disciplinary. The name performance has become an umbrella for everything from stand-up, new music, experimental theater, solo work involving poetry, autobiography, political content and formal theatrical work, to the few true performance-art pieces still being done. I wish a new name could be found for all this other work, because performance art is not an accurate description. It should be reserved for real performance art.
RACHEL ROSENTHAL
Director
The Rachel Rosenthal Company
Los Angeles
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